Creating Interactive Content Experiences That Drive Sales

It’s no surprise that interactive content experiences engage your audience, generate qualified leads, and improve conversion rates. These benefits reinforce the importance of including this kind of content as a significant part of your marketing strategy. But there is no point in creating interactive content if your content isn’t focused on the audience’s demands.

This focus is what will make the leads more interested in the product or service offered, making them qualified, considering they had a customized experience through your content. On the other hand, marketers need to understand that not everyone who registered for a webinar or downloaded an eBook, for example, will actually buy the product.

However, it is easier to reduce this gap when interactive content experiences are built in a smart way. You just have to consider a few points that make the content relevant regardless of what stage of the sales funnel your audience is in. Choosing the right platform is also essential to creating high-converting content that drives sales.

Don’t know how to do it? Read this article and learn how to bring your brand to life!

How to impress and convert your audience?

In the digital age of content, it is not difficult for marketers to have full control over the flow of information sent to the customer, which wasn’t the case even a while ago. At the beginning of the digital age, quick advertisements could set the tone for the conversation that would happen between the customer and the sales team, but it ended there.

Content marketing has revolutionized all of that. Today, marketers are totally able to educate the user through specific content before bringing them to a sales agent. Research from Forrester has shown that the main ingredient of successful nurture is relevant content, which can increase sales opportunities by 20%.

In a traditional nurture program, marketers send prospects a piece of content at regular intervals, usually weekly. But what if you could speed up the users’ journey by empowering them to consume more pieces of content at once? In fact, this is the main role of marketing professionals: helping prospects make a purchase decision as quickly as possible.

This all starts by creating good interactive content experience. If marketers intend to create content that is valuable to both customers and the sales team, there must be open communication about prospects’ demands, pain points, and the buyer’s journey before content creation begins. Below, we’ll explain these points.

Multi-channel cadence

It is not enough to drop someone into nurture by sending them a weekly email and leaving it at that, for example. Instead, try to go beyond the user’s inbox, offering retargeting ads, dynamic and educational website content, readiness chatbots, content recommendations, etc.

The first e-mail may even be lost in the user’s inbox. But it is unlikely that the audience will miss all of your other content marketing efforts to capture their attention — as long as they are engaging and relevant. After all, more than just passive viewers, users have become an integral part of the communicative experience. So, in order to convert more, it is essential to consider their expectations.

Customized content

To understand the importance of building personalized content, put yourself in your audience’s shoes. Wouldn’t it be great if the content could be more personal? It is not at all interesting to see the same sales e-mails over and over, to get the same type of content and the same invitations to subscribe to a newsletter.

In this sense, knowing your business’ pain points and challenges, it is crucial to create content that truly will be relevant for your audience. Again, think about your own experience on the web: wouldn’t it be nice if sales could show you that they understand your real challenges, talk to you in terms that are relevant to you, and recommend solutions that will solve your specific problems, not other people’s problems?

There is no doubt that it is easier to send everyone on your list the same flow, which certainly will drive some engagement and conversions. But you can reach greater results by segmenting your persona and the funnel stage. That way, you will dialogue exactly with your audience’s interests and requirements, increasing conversion rates and performing better.

Valuable experience

You don’t want your prospects to hit a dead end. So, be very careful about the actual experience you are creating with your marketing strategies. Pay attention when choosing content recommendations and proposing calls-to-action, because they should be relevant considering your persona and, especially, the sales funnel stage they are at.

To improve this, think about the questions below before launching content for sales enablement. They will help you to create strategic content that supports the sales team’s goals, supports customer education, and provides valuable insights about the audience for sales and marketing.

What common questions do salespeople ask, and how can you answer them before the first contact?

How educated should a prospect be before they reach the sales team?

At what point during the customer journey should you start pushing prospects toward the sales team?

Who are the prospects that reach out to sales? Have you in fact created a persona for that customer?

How to create content that drives profit

Now that you already know how interactive content experiences can reach your audience and make them continue their path through the company’s sales funnel, you must be wondering where to start. Ion Interactive is the answer. This platform empowers marketers to create content experiences at every stage of the buyer’s journey.

Ion has defined and led this movement in the marketing universe, prompting marketers to think beyond content creation and put their customers first by focusing on their experience. Whit this platform, it is possible to create interactive content from Ion’s built-in collection of prefabricated interactive experience templates. They can be branded, customized, and launched without technical development — many in under an hour.

Ion has over 1,500 combinations of data-driven logic available that can be explored to create attractive and memorable content without worries about coding. Another plus of Ion is that you can utilize your existing team — and existing content — to create interactive experiences that drive sales. Ion’s marketing technology and services deliver measurable business value for hundreds of brands and agencies.

Below, we’ll sum up the specifications of these kinds of content so that you can better understand how they work in your marketing strategy.

Quizzes

Quizzes are one of the most popular examples of interactive content. They are usually found on companies’ websites, blogs, and social media, providing information in a fun, educational, and dynamic way. Did you know that 96 percent of users who start BuzzFeed quizzes finish them? This statistic shows why investing in this kind of content is a good strategy for generating new leads.

Infographics

Interactive infographics are among the most shareable types of content. Obviously, to be attractive and effective, infographics must be beautifully designed and induce users’ actions. This means that, in addition to statistics, the infographic needs to combine a great visual language and propose user engagement through clicks or scrolling.

Calculators

Calculators are a great kind of interactive content because they give customized solutions for the audience, providing huge value according to their expectations. It works by taking users’ input and giving them results about what they are searching for. For example: insurance companies that provide free quotes to visitors interested in purchasing service.

White papers

In the business world, white papers are in-depth informational reports, often used to explain a complex concept, giving persuasive solutions to a specific problem. They usually argue that a certain position is the best way to solve a question, reinforcing brand authority and credibility. So, white papers are powerful tools to influence the decision-making processes of current and prospective clients.

How can Ion help in the sales’ team evaluation?

Ion Interactive also provides some tools made especially for the salesforce to use, giving diagnostics to brands about their marketing performance. These tools help the sales team to evaluate their strategies and learn more about interactive content experiences. Let’s talk about them.

Landing page Self-assessment

This tool allows you to score your landing pages and get instant recommendations. You can learn how your landing pages stack up and what you can do to improve them. You just have to get your page ready and go through the assessment to get insightful recommendations.

Self-assessment

This absolutely free tool shows how your content marketing stacks up against the Content Marketing Institute’s 2017 research. To get the answers, you have to complete a 5-question assessment. Then, the tool will show you how you stack up, give you some recommendations, and let you email them to yourself or your team.

Solution finder

This tool searches solutions for repurposing your content, turning static content into more engaging interactive content. Which content scales best? Into what kinds of experiences? And how does that align with the customer journey? This solution finder answers those questions in just a few minutes for your strategy to perform better.

Value calculator

This tool answers this question: what can interactive content do for you? That interactive content is far more effective than traditional content marketing you already know. But what is that really worth to your brand? With this calculator, you can find the potential business value of your content.

Ion training planner

This tool allows you to design your personal Ion platform training track, with different training and use-case experiences depending on your role and background. You just need to provide some information about your company and the tool instantly places you in a track with a training plan and the capabilities you will have.

Program builder

This tool allows you to create an Ion services program that delivers the results you need. Most marketers have few resources and even fewer hours. So, a smart way to solve this problem is using the right tool to evaluate your strategies and get results from your content, getting a program summary according to your needs and priorities.

Potential value assessment

And what about Ion’s plans?

The tools we listed above are free. But if you want to go further with your content, Ion’s plans can help you improve your marketing strategy. Ion Interactive offers flexible plans to allow our software and services to best meet the unique needs of your business. Our tiered structure puts you in control, letting you customize an option that gives you the scalability, feature set, and strategic support that will help you achieve your interactive content goals.

To find the plan that fits your needs, you just need to answer a few questions about your team, goals, and challenges, and we’ll recommend the right Ion plan for you. As you have seen in this article, your content can have a very different message and effect entirely depending on how, when, and where your audience interacts with it.

Through successful interactive content experiences, you can make a more substantial impact on how the audience sees and values your brand. There is no magic—only hard work to study your persona and develop strategies that really drive results.